Hey, let’s try the weekly! Win 4 battlegrounds, that can’t be too bad can it?
This game perfectly summed up why WoW pvp is terrible, and why some people like it so much.
Player Power Imbalances
My team had a full Rival II Warlock with about 580k HP buffed. We also had a Monk with 216k. If Blizzard cared about a good experience, this just can’t happen. There are a few easy ways to fix this: scaling, templates, minimum item level requirement to queue, etc. Any of those would work. Pick one. When there is that much variation in player power, random sorting is going to result in blowouts more frequently.
Premades
Premades versus solo queuers. We went up against a premade and got camped in spawn room on Silvershard. Oh what fun! This is admittedly tougher to solve than player power imbalances. There are real downsides to not letting players play with their friends and to splitting the queues, but to maximize enjoyment for all, you have to not allow premades in randoms. If you want to play more organized games with your friends, play Rateds. Otherwise you are condoning a miserable player experience for half of your customers in these games.
The end result was predictable: horde team got camped in the spawn room. Every player on the alliance team got 40+ kills and none of them died. Queueing for a random BG is the gateway to pvp, the most entry level, accessible form of PVP. Its stunning that Blizzard is so willing to tolerate most players having a terrible experience in it. I used to think it was incompetence, but after this many years I can only conclude they actively cater to the seal clubbing crew. What a shame.
h ttps://imgur.com/a/sy7bIUV shows the final result
It used to be a lot worse lol. Now if you are not lazy you can be “almost” as geared as that rival player you seem to be worshipping right as you ding 70.
With a little effort just about anyone can eventually get caught up too
The gearing process for a basic honor set with 1 or 2 pieces of conquest gear goes by fast enough this expansion, and that should be sufficient to compete against most players if you know how to play your class. If it took a long time to gear up, I’d agree with all the solutions you stated above. But that’s not the case.
Also… Random BGs were never meant for anything other than a learning experience. Don’t go in there expecting wins or losses. Just go there to learn your toon for rated solo shuffle.
There’s a legitimate argument here that not everyone cares that much about SS or rated for a variety of reasons; they just want to engage in meaningful fun casual PVP.
Having said that your original point stands tall here. Fairly easy to gear up easily.
No doubt. Clearly I am so bad at pvp my mere presence is enough to cause a loss. Undoubtably the 117k ret paladin would’ve done 14 million damage with 20+ KBs if they weren’t handicapped by me.
The problem isn’t that the ceiling is too high now. Although in the past, that was certainly a big part of the problem. The problem is that the floor is too low. Meaning whichever team has more players in 326 blues, or 220 purples from SL (yes, I saw this today) has no hope of being competitive if they have a critical mass of undergeared players.
In the solo queue it can be rough, especially a horde healer and I have gone through bad phases where none of my characters won and I wanted to give up. It does seem like you have less control over outcome but so long as I get my wins and can gear it’s ok I’ll get better and get better gear. It wasn’t like that for a bit, maybe gear differential or I am just really bad but it’s mostly been 1 or 2 to get my daily.
I was just in a kotmogu with a 180k hp mage and 240k hp guardian druid - everyone else was in the 320-360k range, except myself and a warrior. We lost and didn’t clear 100 points. There’s no excuse when 398 greens are cheap on the AH. I was in an AB the match before with 5 hunters sub 350k - 3 were sub 300k… Played 4 random bgs last night and 4 this morning and did not get the daily because of undergeared teammates. Min ilvl needs to be a thing because playing in quest greens is akin to gameplay sabotage - the player knows they’re needing an absolute carry.
I see that less than I did a month ago but I haven’t played horde since then. Even alliance I seem to do better than most other hunters and I just finished Ulfred’s honor set. It was frustrating on my hpal how I’d top heal matches we lost bad because our team did so much less damage.
